Paradox and Indirect Communication
A Symposium organized by Communications and Media Studies, Monash University
May 5, Caulfield Campus, Building H, Room H225, 12.30 to 5.00 pm
A Symposium with Peter Murphy, Markus Locker, Justin Clemens and Dimitris Vardoulakis.
Paradox is a potent form of communication—allowing us the capacity to talk about things that otherwise are practically impossible to talk about, things that otherwise would reduce us to withering silence. This seminar explores the nature of paradox as a form of meta-communication, and the role that it plays at the core of human culture—enabling human beings to pose religious, philosophical, artistic and other central questions of existence that otherwise could not be postulated or even conceived. The paper givers will consider the role of paradox in dramaturgical acts, in the religion-science dialogue, in decision-making, and in artistic representation—and will consider the kinds of strange truths and powerful cultural enigmas that can only be represented in, through and by paradoxical forms of communicative action.
Download a printable PDF version of this programme here
Session 1 - 12:30 to 2:30 pm
‘I am not what I am’: Paradox and Indirect Communication, or the Case of the Comic God and the Dramaturgical Self
Peter Murphy, Monash University
A rambunctious exploration of the self in dramaturgical societies: This is the double, duplicitous, witty self, the one who communicates indirectly through characters and masks, the self who is a personality, who knowingly plays a role on the public stage, and who inhabits a wry, not to say awry, paradoxical world created by a mischievous comic God. A motley bunch of characters wander across the stage of this paper. These include recusant Catholics, American sociologists, theologians of paradox, philosophers of comedy, Oskar Schindler, Mick Jagger, William Shakespeare, G.K. Chesterton, as well as various assorted epicurean puritans, inventive liars, elusive playwrights, pompous intellectuals, sleuthing heroes from detective fiction, ambitious pretenders, satirists of newspaper folly, media nit-wits, boys playing girls playing boys, and, if you are really good, girls playing boys playing girls. All of them bearing testament to Viola’s immortal line: ‘I am not what I am’.
And Who Shaves God? Inviting Paradoxes and Creativity into Science and Faith Communications
Markus Ekkehard Locker, Ateneo de Manila University
Speaking of truth inescapably confronts us with paradoxes, i.e. correct deductive propositions — like a Cretan claiming that all Cretans lie — that due to negative systemic self-reference end up as circular contradictions, indeterminable questions, or dilemmas. Faced with the numerous paradoxical statements (apparently 82) found in the Bible, the German Protestant reformer Sebastian Franck (1499-1542), for example, conceded that any truth of God cannot be found in language but only in the immediate silent experience of God. Likewise, believers in an uncompromising search for true facts about this world would certainly agree with (though arguably misappropriate) Wittgenstein in claiming that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Paradoxes—this presentation claims—must neither be feared, nor avoided, nor become subject to hopeless attempts in searching for logic solutions. Paradoxes lead the way to truth in demonstrating that questions of truth, or truth claims, cannot be adequately addressed within the same system of communication (ortho-system) in which they are raised. The encounter with paradoxes (e.g. a God who creates but is uncreated) elevates language and communication onto a meta-level (or system) of communication in which new means (like for instance Gödel’s numbering) are needed to speak of what is real but apparently can’t be true. These means, however, will turn out to be likewise paradoxes that furthermore call for new and creative ways of speaking of such truths that previously could not be communicated. The creative admission of paradoxes into communication philosophy will not solve age-old problems or dilemmas, but it will playfully open up the conversation of science with religion to the creative means of the arts in which truth is not argued but performed in paradoxes.
Break, 2:30 – 3:00 pm
Drinks at Mama Duke Cafe
Session 2 - 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Spinoza’s Ass
Justin Clemens, The University of Melbourne
In the Corollary to Prop. XLIX in his Ethics, Spinoza asks, “it may be objected, if man does not act from free will, what will happen if the incentives to action are equally balanced as in the case of Buridan’s ass? Will he perish of hunger and thirst?” This presentation examines some of the difficulties that the paradox of Buridan’s ass poses for thought, especially for theories of decision-making and action.
Paradoxical Surprise: Walter Benjamin’s Materialist Anti-Humanism
Dimitris Vardoulakis, Monash University
This paper looks at the way that surprise figures within Walter Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility II.” The point of departure is the comment in Section XI that a director can film surprise by startling an actor who is unaware of being filmed. This example is used to illustrate what Benjamin call the paradoxical detachability and transportability of the human image. Therefore, man is no longer the owner of his own image, nor in possession of a criterion of image identity. How does this effect the humanist presupposition of man being in the image of God? I will argue that surprise shows that Benjamin’s essay is structure as the interweaving of three different types of paradoxes which exemplify the notion of “reproducibility.”